You might have noticed that the Posts module has a lot of structure. Folders and boards, tags and categories, collections, and lots of little boxes to put your content into. The reason for that, believe it or not, is flexibility. On the Composer side, you can come up with almost an infinite number of ways to combine, divide up, and even reuse that content — dynamically. You can make the configuration as simple or as complex as you want. And it all starts with the Post element.
Each Post element has the ability to pull posts from different boards, collections, and portions of boards filtered by tags and more. This article explains how boards, collections, and tags can be combined and configured to filter posts in exactly the right way to reach your audience. We’ll start with the most basic scenario and expand upon it with additional rules and filters. You may find that you only need the first level, or you might use all three on different pages of your site. The flexibility of Posts means that you can use as many or as few of the available tools as you require.
In this article
- Level 1: Display boards or collection
- Level 2: Display tagged posts from boards or collection
- Level 3: Create additional filtering rules
- Next steps
Level 1: Display boards or collection
When you set aside all the customization and refinement options, creating and displaying posts is a straightforward process.
- Create a board in Posts.
- Select the board to display in a Post element in Composer.
- Create a post on the board in Posts, and it dynamically displays in the Post element in Composer.
- Repeat step 3.
You can create numerous boards in Posts and display the posts from many of those boards in the same Post element in alphabetical or date order. If you want to take that a step further and display posts from any board in a specific order, you can create a collection in Posts and display that in the Post element, as well. You can even display a collection alongside one or more boards.
Start by adding a Post element to a page. In the element settings, open Content Filters and look for Display posts from Collection or Display posts from Board(s).
Display post from Board(s) is the most commonly used option; however, posts from a collection will appear above posts from boards in the element, so the collection picker shows first. Use the dropdown menu to select a collection to show in the element. (If you don’t see the collection option, that means you haven’t created any collections yet.)
Next to Display posts from Board(s), click Select Board to view the folder structure from Posts. Click on a folder icon (not the name) to expand the folder and select the checkbox next to one or more of the boards in that folder. Select as many boards as you’d like, then click Apply to save the selection.
Note: Posts are never duplicated in an element. If you display a collection with a particular post alongside the board where that post lives, the post would display as part of the collection and not be repeated in the board posts below.
If you want to display all posts from the selected board(s) and/or collection, collapse the Content Filters section and move on to the Content Details section.
Level 2: Display tagged posts from boards or collection
Whether you’re trying to make the best use of a limited number of boards or you want to set up posting permissions as simply as possible, you may be in a situation where you only want to display a subset of the posts on a particular board (or even across multiple boards). In this case, you can use tags to filter which posts you want to display.
Follow the steps from Level 1 to select which board(s) and/or collection you want to display boards from. Then find the setting for That also belong to [All Tags/Specific Tags] below the collection and/or board setting.
Select Specific Tags to bring up a search field where you can look up any tag that has been applied to one or more of your posts. When you see the tag appear, click on it to add it to the configuration. (If it doesn’t appear, go back to Posts and make sure that it has been added to one of your posts.) Search again to add multiple tags to the filter.
This tag filter setting combines with the board or collection setting above it to form a sentence: Display posts from Board(s) X that also belong to Y tags.” For example, you may want to display posts from Board(s) “All News” that also belong to "Athletics News" tags. In this manner, you have created an Athletic News page on your site for sports fans, but you can also display athletics news as part of the general news feed that’s on your homepage.
If you want to display certain posts from board(s) or a collection that use a specific tag or tags, collapse the Content Filters section and move on to the Content Details section.
Tag Manager Feature
Our new Tag Manager can help you to revamp your tagging system as you and your team streamline tags used more consistently on all of your posts across boards. To learn more about this, please read the article, Organize tags in Posts with Tag Manager.
Level 3: Create additional filtering rules
In Posts, you may find there are a lot of different ways to accomplish the same goal. If you want to display all of the posts from one or more boards and only a portion of the posts from some other boards, you could create a collection or use tags in such a way that a single tag filter could target all of them. Alternatively, you can create a second set of filter rules using the Display additional Board(s) settings.
In this case, follow the steps to select a collection, board(s), and tags as above and then repeat them for the additional rule that you want to create. This section is identical to the “Display posts from Board(s)” section above it, so you have complete flexibility to design the rules as you need.
As noted above, posts are not duplicated in the element, so you don’t have to worry about overlap. Posts from boards targeted with either board filter are shown once in the date or alphabetical order that you specify in the “Formatting” settings of the Post element. (Unless they are also in a collection, in which case they would show at the top of the element in the collection order.)
Example: District and school news
In this example, an admin for a school district website wants to display news from the district on a specific school’s page, and vice-versa. Visitors to the elementary school site aren’t going to be interested in all of the news from the district, only what’s relevant to the elementary school. Likewise, district site visitors don’t want to know about every kindergarten graduation, but some news may be of interest at the district level.
The admin has a District News board and an Elementary School board. In the Posts module, she adds an “elementary” tag to posts on the District News board that would be interesting to elementary school parents, and she tags district-related posts on the Elementary School board as “district.”
Best practice: Consider your audience when you’re deciding how to tag posts. In this article, we only discuss internal uses for tags, but you may want to display the tags associated with a post in Composer, or add a Post Tools element to let users filter by tags themselves.
In Composer, on the district news page, she edits the Post element and uses the “Display posts from Board(s)” filter to select the District News board. Then, she uses the “Display additional Board(s)” filter to select the Elementary School board. Since she only wants certain posts from this board, she changes the switch to “Specific Tags” and searches for the “district” tag.
Next, she edits the Post element on the elementary school news page. This time, she adds the Elementary School board to the “Display posts from Board(s)” filter and the District News board to “Display additional Board(s).” She then selects “Specific Tags” and searches for “elementary” to display relevant posts from the additional board.
Next steps
There are even more settings in the Content Filters section of the Post element that aren’t covered in this article, namely the featured/non-featured selector and “Ignore Role/Group Display Settings.” It’s not necessary or even advisable to use every single one of the options available in the Post element. The important part is to create a system that works for your site and your organization. Let Posts help you publish the content your community needs in the format that works for them.
Now that you’ve decided which posts to show in the element, you can continue building your Posts page to showcase that content effectively.
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